


Even a Million Scars (Doesn't Change Who You Are)

by SecretEnigma



Series: Lunoct Week [6]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Altissia (Final Fantasy XV), Couch Cuddles, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gralea (Final Fantasy XV), Happy Ending, Just Because the Fight Is Over Doesn't Mean You Can Walk Away, Lunoct Week, Lunoct Week 2020, Nightmares, Without Scars, talking about nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:14:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26668030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecretEnigma/pseuds/SecretEnigma
Summary: For Lunoct Week 2020. Prompt used: NightmareThe war is over and fate has been turned aside, but that doesn't mean the trauma just goes away.Five years after the end of the Long Night and all that came before, Noctis and Luna comfort each other over their nightmares.
Relationships: Lunafreya Nox Fleuret/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Series: Lunoct Week [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1934224
Comments: 4
Kudos: 39
Collections: Lunoct Week 2020





	Even a Million Scars (Doesn't Change Who You Are)

**Author's Note:**

> Another short one! Not sure how I feel about it to be honest ... I mean I liked writing it, but ... idk. I hope it's a nice read despite the brevity and the angst.
> 
> Also I forever hold that Gralea was the most traumatic and terrifying part of the game and that Noctis would absolutely have a ton of hangups and trauma about it. Someday I'll post a rant on Tumblr explaining why but that is Not This Day.

Noctis was already up when he felt Luna’s magic start to tremble. Getting up from his seat at the kitchenette counter, he hurried back to their bedroom as the vague tremors of his wife’s magic turned to a silent cry of _fear-pain-despair_ that brought the taste of rain to his tongue and made his heart shudder in his chest with remembered grief.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and swallowed back the taste of ocean salt and rain as he laid a hand on her shoulder, “Luna.” She jerked under his hand, snapping awake with a gasp and a disorientated flail of her hand that he gently caught. He wrapped his own magic around her in a heartbeat of _love-safe-calm_ as steady as he could make it. Blue eyes finally focused on their surroundings, a bedroom lit by a little nightlight by their bedside —neither of them could stand the total dark anymore, neither could relax without some form of light to keep them safe—, and her frightened breathing turned ragged with relief. Her free hand drifted down toward her side, then she shook her head and shifted her other hand to grip his. Noctis squeezed it back and whispered, “You’re alright. It’s over now.”

He didn’t bother telling her that it was just a dream. They both knew that the only dreams that kept them up these days were memories, or based on memories. But memories were of the past. They were safe here.

That fact was hard to remember though, even now, five years after it had all come to an end.

Luna closed her eyes, opened them and whispered, “I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

Noctis tugged on her hand instead of answering, drawing her gently out of the bed and toward the kitchenette in the next room, “I made tea.”

In the dim light, her gaze turned sad and understanding, “I’m sorry.” _I should have woken up and kept you company._

He huffed, “Better one of us get an extra hour of sleep.” _I would rather you dream peacefully than suffer nightmares with me._

He settled her down on a stool by the counter —they had never gotten around to having a proper dining table in the suite, they preferred their informality in the privacy of their own rooms— and poured her a cup of tea. He warmed it up with a judicious —frivolous— use of fire magic, then passed it to her. He reclaimed his seat as she sipped gratefully on the tea, reheated his own and grimaced at the bitter taste —it wasn’t his favorite blend, but it his favorite blends tended to put him back to sleep, and that was … unwanted right now—. They sat in companionable silence for a while before Luna started, “I was in Altissia. Calling upon the Lucii to give you the strength to survive.” She took a careful breath and shivered gratefully when he laid his hand over her wrist, “Ardyn came, and his knife took away my strength to speak. The Lucii could not hear me… You died at my side, and then so did Ravus, and my mother, and the servants in the manor who tried so hard to keep me free of Niflheim’s influence in my own home where they could.” Her breath hitched, “Eventually I could not see the sky for the bodies all around me.”

A memory turned more conventional nightmare then. Noctis brushed his thumb over the back of her hand, letting the sensation ground them both, “That’s not what happened.” He reminded her, because even though she knew that, he knew it helped to hear it anyway, “You saved me, and then Gentiana managed to save you. We survived everything Altissia threw at us, and then we went and saved the world.” He leaned over to kiss her temple and felt her magic brush against his lips in _affection-gratitude_. He let the silence sit for a while, then Luna tilted her head in that way that meant she was waiting. Of course she was waiting. She had told him her nightmare, now she waited for him to tell her his —“for better or for worse”, they had vowed, “in sickness and in health”, and unspoken between them in that vow had been “through nightmares and flashbacks” too—.

It took him longer to find his voice then, to air the nightmare that had driven him from their bed an hour previous, the one that still twisted in the shadows of the room and made the back of his mouth taste like metal and Scourge despite his tea, “Gralea.” He managed at last, though even saying just that word felt like dragging shrapnel out of his throat. Luna looked at him with patience, but not understanding.

He had never talked about this nightmare before. Five years and countless repeats of this same ritual and he still had yet to actually **tell** her why that one place was the home of his darkest demons. Darker than being on the run during the road trip, darker than any of the Solheim ruins he and his brothers had waded into. Darker even than that final battle in the ruins of Insomnia where they had come so **close** to fulfilling the destined tragedy inherent in the Prophecy. All his other nightmares he had shared with her on nights like this, an even exchange for the ones she shared with him —nightmares of being trapped in the Manor, or of the day Tenebrae fell, or of close calls while waking the Astrals, and so many, many more—, but not Gralea.

He opened his mouth, closed it again, mustered up the dregs of his courage and whispered, “I lost Regalia there. It shouldn’t have mattered. She was just a car after all, but…” He rubbed a hand over his face, “She was Dad’s car. I had one of my own, but he insisted I take Regalia on the trip. After … after he died, it felt just a bit like he was still with me, in the car. That car was my safe space as a kid, where Dad would sit in the back with me during a drive and we’d just be father and son, not king and prince. When I lost her … it was like losing him all over again. I lost that one last thing I had of him, the one last place where I was always safe.” He could still see it, in his mind’s eye, the fires on the road, the shattered windshield, the paint and chassis ruined by scratches and dents and tears.

He could remember everything that came after it too, “My magic wasn’t working anymore, and then a minute after that … I got separated from Iggy and Gladio. It was just- just me. Me, and the Ring, and **Ardyn**. His voice following me everywhere in the halls, never knowing when one of the supposedly dead MT units on the floor would leap up and grab me while he laughed and told me Prompto was here, that my brothers **needed** me-.” He stopped. He couldn’t say more. Couldn’t begin to describe what it was like, to go from having his brothers at his back and his father’s memory giving him shelter to having **nothing**. No safe space, no shelter, no brothers, no magic of his own, no backup, no **hope**. Just the terror of creeping down the streets and hallways and the sick churning in his stomach as he found the broken MT unit in the chair and left it behind even though he wasn’t sure —had never been sure until he found the real Prompto— that Ardyn hadn’t tricked him into leaving his injured best friend behind, pleading on the floor while illusions kept Noctis from seeing or hearing him.

There had been many moments during the Road Trip, and later the Long Night, where he had been terrified, or angry, or sick to his stomach from some other emotion. But Gralea…

Noctis had lost everything in Gralea, and even though he had reunited with his brothers and gotten his magic back eventually, Noctis knew that he had left pieces of himself behind in those abandoned streets and halls … and that he was never going to get them back.

A slender hand rested on the back of his neck, grounding him back to the kitchenette and the room around him, to the softer shadows and the lingering taste of tea on his tongue rather than blood and steel and Scourge, “We are not there anymore, My Love. You survived, and so did your brothers.”

Noctis leaned into her touch, reached out a hand to rest it on her knee in return, “Sometimes it feels like we’ve never left,” he admitted quietly, not just thinking of his nightmares, but hers. How many times had they done this dance since getting married? How many times had one or both of them woken up from nightmares born of memory? For him those things were daemons, or being pulled into Crystal for him, or the close calls on the Road Trip, or **Gralea**. For Luna those things were the fall of Insomnia, slowly dying to awaken the Astrals, or all the years she’d been forced to sit and play pet Oracle for the emperor and his nobles during formal events because her very homeland was being held hostage to keep her in line. How many times had those ghosts come back in dreams to strangle them?

Too many times, probably.

“It feels like we’re still there,” he whispered, “or like we got too many scars while escaping to get better anymore.”

Luna smiled, thin and sad. She knew the feeling too. She had just as many nightmares as Noctis after all, just as many bad days and hard nights that he had to comfort her through as she did him. Because the Prophecy might have ended and a dawn free of the Starscourge won, but scars didn’t fade nearly as easily. Especially ones of the mind. “I believe someone very wise and kind told me after one of my nightmares that ‘even a million scars does not change who we are, just take it one day at a time and we will find our way out again’.”

Noctis huffed despite himself, “Wise, huh? You’ll have to introduce me sometime.”

Luna hummed and rubbed little circles at the base of his neck, accustomed to his sarcasm after five years of watching him use it like a shield, “You were right the night after we were married, you’re words still ring true now.”

He leaned into her touch with a sigh, “If you say so.”

Standing up, Luna reached down to tug his hands, leading him away from the counter and their abandoned tea to rest instead on the couch. Noctis obediently settled first, slipping free of her hands to wrap his arms around her waist as she settled against him, unfolding the battered old camping blanket that served as their throw blanket —much to Ignis’s eternal despair on behalf of their interior decorating— to tuck it around their legs and one of her shoulders. Neither of them bothered trying to go back to their proper bed, they had learned that the chances of falling back to sleep there after a bad nightmare were too low to bother with. Instead they curled together on the couch and whispered to each other. Childhood stories, funny anecdotes, little nicknames, harmless secrets, and slow, gentle kisses when the urge took them. A collage of softer, happier things that helped pull them away from the memories of their nightmares and the aftertaste of blood and rain and steel and Scourge.

Ignis slipped into the apartment the next morning with his spare key to find his king and queen curled up together on the couch in the early morning light, the old camp blanket tangled around their legs, Luna’s head tucked under Noctis’s chin and his arm fitted over the small of her back. The bags under their eyes spoke of lost sleep, but the slow rhythm of their breathing spoke of blessedly dreamless rest, and the ease in their expressions made them look, for the moment, young and at peace.

Whole, despite all their scars, so long as they were together.


End file.
